2 vari­ants of Zika vac­cine ready

NEW DELHI: Within days of the US govern­ment and French pharma ma­jor Sanofi an­nounc­ing they had launched an ef­fort to de­velop a Zika vac­cine, Hy­der­abad­based Bharat Biotech said on Wed­nes­day it had two vari­ants ready for pre- clin­i­cal stud­ies, one re­com­bi­nant and the other in­ac­ti­vated.

A re­com­bi­nant vac­cine in­volves DNA en­cod­ing that stim­u­lates an im­mune re­sponse while an in­ac­ti­vated one con­sists of virus par­ti­cles grown un­der con­trolled con­di­tions and ren­dered non-in­fec­tious.

“We have two can­di­date vac­cines in de­vel­op­ment. One of them is an in­ac­ti­vated vac­cine that has reached the stage of pre- clin­i­cal test­ing in an­i­mals,” com­pany chair­man and man­ag­ing di­rec­tor Dr Kr­ishna Ella said, adding that pre- clin­i­cal tri­als would take five months.

The In­dian Coun­cil of Med­i­cal Re­search (ICMR) will ex­am­ine the claim made by the firm this week.

“It is worth look­ing at. The com­mit­tee will first need to val­i­date the claim, but look­ing at the global sit­u­a­tion, we will work as quickly as pos­si­ble,” said Dr Soumya Swami­nathan, di­rec­tor­gen­eral of the um­brella re­search or­gan­i­sa­tion.